The Right Number of Arrows to Shoot Per Day

I am working on my 2017 training and competition plans. Out of curiosity I looked for plans written by archery coaches. There were a lot programs. Many of them where nothing more than a review of how to fitness train for archery. The USA Archery plan was a data entry spreadsheet. While there may be a good plan out there I stopped looking. What I was finding wasn’t all that informative. Heck, one plan was an endurance cardio plan that had been poorly modified for archery.

But, it got me thinking, not that this is an exclusive element to performance, how many arrows do top archers shoot per day?

The range was vast. There were people claiming to be elite archers than practice a few times a week and shoot about 100 arrows per week. One person posted that Olympic archers shoot 5000 arrows per week. I did the math on 5000 arrows a week -nope that’s not a real number.

Most of my daily plans call for a minimum number of arrows for each day of training. The quantity of arrows isn’t the focus. The primary aim is the type of shooting.

I often start out like this, but it doesn’t last.

Practice for 3D might be yardage repeats. Shooting repeats will end up having a lot more arrows shot that stickily 3D target practice. The difference could be as many as 60 arrows. For 18-meters I might end up shooting 300 arrows in a day. For 50 meters it will be less because I’ll spend more time walking back and forth to the target. There is only so much time in a day.

Here’s what I know, I can spend about 6 hours a day shooting before it becomes a low return exercise. I know that for muscular endurance and neurological development it take a lot of arrows.

Yardage repeats mean breaking arrows.

Right now I’m shooting on average of 156 arrows a day. That’s the average. Some days I may only shoot 30 arrows, active recovery days. Other days I’ll shoot over 200. But, I’m not just slinging arrows. And the time spend shooting excludes blind bailing, and fitness workouts.

Nearly every day is broken into two or three pure archery practice session. Each has a specific goal. The pure archery training takes from 1 to 6 hours. Every week I include a light day and there is always a heavy day. Then, there are days that are real specific or very diverse.

Shooting Robin Hoods is expensive. When I am working on form I often use a less expensive arrow so the loss isn’t so great. Here I was trying to get it right a 60 yards. Trying to pull the group over to the center.

So, the right number of arrows for me, at the moment seems to be around 1092 arrows per week. Thirty arrows a few times a week are way to little, 5000 arrows per week seems like an exaggeration. One thousand ninety-two is a good number if archery is your only job.

Pin nock have saved me some money.

(Note: Shooting a lot means going through a lot of arrows. It would be real nice to have an arrow sponsor.)